I’m glad that somebody other than me sees that the Kurds are fighting to defend their homes rather for Syria or Iraq and that encouraging them to fight for Syria or Iraq will prove futile. In this case it’s Dexter Filkins, writing in the New Yorker:
For the Kurds, the new reality has amounted to a paradox: leaders in both Baghdad and Washington want the Kurds to fight ISIS, but the Kurds themselves mostly just want to secure Iraq’s Kurdish areas.
That means that the Kurds had every reason to want to liberate Sinjar. The Yazidis may be a religious minority—most Kurds are Sunni Muslims—but the majority of them are Kurdish-speaking. The Kurdish Regional Government, based in the city of Erbil, isn’t likely to stop battling ISIS until Sinjar is completely reunited with the Kurdish region. Peshmerga fighters have been preparing for this operation for months, having re-conquered nearby Mount Sinjar late last year.
If the peshmerga have indeed cut off the main highway that leads from the Syrian border, then Mosul is now quite isolated. Still, the evidence suggests that, once the Kurds fully retake Sinjar, they’ll stop fighting. Mosul, at least the parts held by ISIS, has a largely Arab population, and if Kurdish leaders sent their fighters in, they would likely face stiff, even popular, resistance. Retaking Mosul is most likely being reserved for the Iraqi Army, which, if it recovers, is likely to remain largely Arab. “We are happy to support an offensive to retake Mosul, but we won’t lead it,†the Kurdish official told me.
Should it be pointed out that the Iraq army refused to fight for Mosul when they held it earlier? That they ran away when faced with a much smaller force? That the people in Mosul (many) welcomed DAESH as the Shia Iraqi government was hated so much?
Steve